Audio

A friend of mine bought a new amplifier, but he wasn’t pleased with the sound. So he called me and asked if I could recommend a good old amplifier that could drive smaller speakers because he likes the aesthetic of older things. And the venerable NAD 3020B was the first one that came to mind. When I was young, this was the first affordable amplifier that sounded good. It’s not a powerhouse by any means, putting out (a very conservative estimate) 2 x 20 watts. But the phono stage accepts both MM and MC pickups which is excellent, and the sound quality is exceptional. So he scoured the used market and finally found a NAD 3020B. Unfortunately, when he got it home, there was a loud hum from the output. So I told him to send it to me so I could fix it. ...

Apple Music So I gave Apple Music streaming a try. Being able to just search for music and add it to my playlists sounded like a good idea. After a while the recommendations becomes rather good as well, giving me some tips of other bands I might like. But here’s the problem I have with Apple Music. When you sync your music via iCloud, you can no longer sync music via iTunes! And to be able to download music locally from Apple Music to your phone, you must use the “in the iCloud” solution. Catch–22 anyone? ...

Audio Engineering Pioneer John Meyer: Stop Chasing The Next Big Thing, And Go With Flac Instead — Tech News And Analysis: John Meyer may be making really expensive loudspeakers, but when it comes to high-end audio, the audio engineering pioneer prefers free. FLAC, the open source audio format developed by Grateful Dead fans to trade bootleg recordings, is “the perfect format” for music aficionados looking for higher-resolution audio, Meyer told me during a recent interview. And to him, any company pushing trying to make a buck with selling upsampled music is just out to sell snake oil. “It’s tricking people who don’t know enough about technology,” he said. ...

Crystal cMoy Freeform Headphone Amp: Very cool transparent cMoy headphone amplifier, made using clear casting resin. This is something I have to try. Via 0pachira

Update: You can find my latest update on the progress of my Raspberry Pi Car Audio System here. I’m working on a Raspberry Pi as a music player in my car. I’m putting all my music on a SSD disk in lossless FLAC. I’ve already got hold of a 2x16 character LCD with six button from Adafruit that only uses two pins for communication with I2C. It’s easy to program and it has four different background colors. ...

I love my music playback setup that consists of a couple of Squeezebox V3 players in different rooms so I can listen to music in lossless format wherever I am in the apartment. With the iPeng HD app on my iPad, I have a nice interface for controlling the players with album art and other nice features. But the best part is that I can playback high resolution audio directly on my iPad using the Camera Kit USB adapter and an HRT HeadStreamer DAC portable USB headphone amplifier. But I wanted a small, cheap and eco-friendly server for hosting my music files and wondered if I could use the Raspberry Pi. And here’s my findings. ...

[caption id=“attachment_969” align=“alignnone” width=“292” caption=“Lenn-Art Subwoofer”][/caption] Last time I ordered some speaker elements from Germany I ordered some extra Tang Band W8-740C subwoofer elements for a later build. I’ve been oogling this design to go with my home-built?ProAc 2.5 clones. Micke, a friend will make the boxes for me, provided I sent him the drawings. What an exellent excuse to try to learn Solidworks. Amazing program. I have designed my own version of the venerable GainClone amplifier with a beefed up power supply and will use two subwoofers in stereo. Nice to not have to build the boxes. Last time when I built the clones the apartment was filled with MDF dust for months.

Part two of this series is now up. Read on how to install a better clock in your Pioneer PD S-505 CD player. Mods your Pioneer PD S-505 CD Player for better sound quality So I bought this Pioneer PD S-505 for $40 to test how good audio quality I’m able to squeeze out by modifying it. But It will not be just the standard subjective judgment of improvement but also measurements. Back in 2000, you had to pay about $400 for it. It uses the stable platter which means you have to put the CD in upside down. So let’s get going. ...

After using Spotify for a couple of days, I must say that they almost nailed it. And I have never seen as much entusiasm about a new service among people of so different age groups. The Mac client is really nice (and fast!) This is something the music business should have come up with a long time ago. I think I bought about five songs on iTunes total. I like the idea of “owning” my music, or at least own the piece of plastic it comes on. But the chear joy of being able to just search and ad a shitload of music and start listening is exhilarating. But I have a couple of gripes… ...

So finally my new ProAc Response 2.5 clone playing music. And how they play! I got myself a new Class-A amplifier to have something nice to drive them with. At first they sounded a bit short on the bass side, but now after about 20 hours of listening, the bass starts to improve. I’ve never believed in the “burn-in” of speakers, but I have to say I’ve been mistaken. ...